Thursday, December 28, 2006

NEA--Classroom Bullies

Go read the entire article about the Washington State case going before the Supreme Court in January. I'm watching the case closely for reasons I can't yet divulge--but they're big reasons! Anyway, here's a snippet that cuts to the chase:

The case will have a major impact on the free speech rights of employees nationwide. At issue is whether unions can force employees to subsidize partisan politics against their will.

Thomas Jefferson described that act as the very definition of tyranny, and yet the Democrats look to him as a founder of their party. As I've said so many times, hypocrisy is a strong suit of the American Left. But back to the article:

“I had many objections to the National Education Association, because I didn’t feel it concentrated its efforts on workplace issues,” says Cindy Omlin, a former speech pathologist in Spokane, Washington. Instead, her union focused its efforts on a left-wing social agenda that had little to do with education. “Many times I would be working as a private citizen on political issues and find that I was paying the other side through my union dues.”

Ms. Omlin gets it right. As long as there's forced unionization, the unions should focus only on employee pay, benefits, and working conditions. Anything else represent's Jefferson's tyranny. And there's more:

A Washington Education Association lawyer actually argued in court that the union owes no “fiduciary duty” to its teachers.

That doesn't surprise me.

Unions also ostracize and harass teachers who exercise their First Amendment rights. After Cindy Omlin discovered she could opt out of the union’s political spending, she and a colleague began notifying other teachers of their rights. The union actually sued her in an attempt to silence her, and offered to drop the lawsuit if she promised not to criticize the union.